


Hiding from the History Channel

by FlamingoQueen



Series: Fossilized [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (It's totally magic), (also pronounced "coping mechanisms"), (it's pronounced "coping mechanisms"), Anxiety Attacks, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Crack Treated Seriously, Dinosaurs, Established Relationship, Happy Steve Bingo, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, M/M, Post-Recovery Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers Has Issues, The Ancient Aliens Man, The History Channel, Time Travel, Vacation, it's not magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-28 08:30:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20775575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlamingoQueen/pseuds/FlamingoQueen
Summary: “Steve, what dinosaur is out here making rope in the prehistoric woods? What dinosaur wears fucking hiking boots and walks completely upright?”Yes, okay, point to Bucky. But they can’t exactly helpwalking, and without boots they’d still be leaving footprints. And it really is a smallish bit of forest on a huge planet…Bucky bundles the rest of the pterodactyl in some ferns to dump a mile or so out from their camp later. “We’re going to be on Ancient Aliens, Steve. We’re going tobethe ancient aliens.”(Or: Not all of Bucky’s concerns are logical. Some of them are just plain ridiculous. But Steve is willing to help him hide from the History Channel.)





	Hiding from the History Channel

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the next bit of the series based on my Happy Steve Bingo card! This is for N3: Free Space: Scared of something harmless/silly. It might help if you read part one, but it shouldn't be absolutely necessary.
> 
> (And there is still no relation whatsoever to the Hazy series, so everything remains not horrible. ^_^)

By his internal clock, which is the closest he has to a real clock, since his phone is a completely useless brick and the canopy overhead doesn’t allow for a very accurate assessment of the sun’s position, Steve has been working on recreating not-magic time-traveling symbols for three hours.

The one time he thought he was on to something—really, genuinely on to something, enough so that he was prepared to call Bucky over to double check—he’d taken another look at his work and discovered that what he’d been on to was less mysterious symbol from a ruined petroglyph millions of years in the future, and more a doodle of Bucky riding a triceratops, despite them not having seen anything that looks like a triceratops yet.

It’s maybe a little impractical, but Steve hasn’t erased that doodle, and he doesn’t plan to. Bucky’s very happy on top of that armored tank, and while he hopes it won’t actually become an issue, he is prepared to wrestle a three-horned dinosaur to its knees if that means Bucky can sit on its back and beam like he does in the doodle.

Particularly since Bucky in 3-D hasn’t been actively working on his palm-fiber twine since about halfway through Steve’s current attempt at the symbols, and is instead just staring at the fibers in his hands like they’ve wronged him. 

And that’s been it for their past… going on two weeks, he supposes. 

Steve will draw symbols for hours, symbols that aren’t even close to what he can’t remember, until Bucky decides they have to eat something, or drink some water, or try a new type of juniper berry to see if it makes one of them sick—they take turns being the guinea pig, just in case. Bucky’s been wrong only once, which is impressive for what they’re looking at on the food front. As it happens, most of the mushrooms in the immediate area are safe to eat, at least at whatever stage they were in when Bucky had gathered them, but the ones that aren’t safe are not a good time _at all_.

And while Steve draws symbols, Bucky will come and go on silent feet, bringing random things back to their little camp, improving the structural integrity of the platform Steve’s been thinking of as their treehouse, catching and cooking fish, dismembering other things Steve doesn’t study too closely because some of them are adorable, hauling bones and skin and whatever else far enough out that nothing less adorable comes sniffing for carrion.

When Steve’s not working on the symbols, he’s trying to get his phone to turn on, trying not to think about magic, trying not to worry that he might not see his friends and teammates again for at least a very long time, and possibly not ever.

When Bucky’s not actively improving their campsite, cautiously sampling the local plant life, or otherwise keeping them fed, he’s messing around with palm leaves. Sometimes painstakingly separating out fibers and twisting them together into some sort of prehistoric twine and sometimes weaving prehistoric baskets that never seem to hold their shape as well as that first project to weave the treehouse.

It’s a little frustrating, but it’s not miserable, and they’ve still got each other to lean on. There’s a bit less banter and a bit more focus. But Steve can’t help but feel that they almost have it, that they just need a breakthrough.

What with Bucky staring into space and Steve drawing doodles instead of symbols, though, they could clearly both use a simple break in addition to that breakthrough. A vacation from this vacation.

“You know,” Steve says, setting aside the paper to give his eyes a breather and stir some shit up into a playful exchange, “you _ were _ right. You can go ahead and say you told me so.” 

Honestly, Steve’s been expecting to get that lecture for two weeks now. He’s still surprised Bucky went that whole first day without mentioning it at least three times, and here it is, going on their second week stranded in a forest filled with dinosaurs, and he hasn’t said a single thing about it. Not even once.

Bucky, he knows, is not that kind of patient. Not about this. Not when there’s an opportunity to lightly needle Steve and generally be every last inch a little shit about it. But Bucky remains silent, staring down at the ball of palm twine he’s been steadily building up because “rope is a fucking survival tool, Steve, now pass me that palm branch.” 

At the moment, Bucky’s not twisting fibers between his fingers or winding the latest length onto the twine ball. He’s just staring at his work. Brooding or pensive, Steve can’t quite tell. He’s definitely there, though, not lost in some other disaster that’s similar enough to this one to get dragged back a bit. 

Although that might just because there’s no way a similar disaster could ever have happened. Equally stressful disasters, possibly—even probably, since he’d have been dealing with them on his own. But facing off against dinosaurs with a handful of knives and little else has to be a new one, even for Bucky.

“Bucky?” He sighs. It’s been a very quiet three days. “It would make me feel better if you said something. Even just ‘I told you so.’” 

Steve gives him a moment to respond, but Bucky just adds a frown to his previous staring. “Because you did,” he adds. “I should have brought the shield, and you should have brought all the weapons I said you didn’t need for a two-week vac—”

“No.”

Steve pauses. Well, it’s _ a _ response. “…No? No, what?”

Bucky stands up, takes a breath, lets it out slow, his ball of twine gripped tightly in a fist with the latest unfinished length dropping loosely groundward. “No, you were right, not wrong. We can’t _ have _that shit here.”

He narrowly avoids saying “now” at Bucky, because this just doesn’t seem like the time for that. “Okay. Why is that, exactly?”

Steve gestures toward the ferns around them, and then the trees above them. “We’re legitimately surrounded by very large animals, many of which almost certainly want to eat us, and we have five knives, a single water bottle, a piece of paper, and a comic book about elves.”

Bucky glares at him flatly.

“Alright, and your palm string and a temporary treehouse setup,” Steve concedes. It’s not like that adds a huge amount of supplies to their inventory. They could have used the shield to great effect, even just as a skillet. 

Bucky shakes his head, and starts pacing. “Steve. _ Steve_. You know how they do the thing, the thing with the teeth and the marks and all the pottery?”

He’s tempted to say that no, he doesn’t—because he _ doesn’t_—but Bucky’s clearly having a moment and that would just dump some kindling on the fire. Maybe a gallon of gasoline, too. Now that Steve really thinks on it, Bucky’s been more than just quiet these past few days. 

It’s just, Bucky does that. Sometimes has quiet days, or stretches of quiet days. And then cracks a joke and is back to living in full color, usually without ever revealing what had upset him. Steve figures he’s got a lot to choose from, and when he wants to share, he will.

He nods up at Bucky, encouraging. “Walk me through it, Buck.” And, he doesn’t add, maybe also walk me through the rest of whatever it is that’s bothering you.

“They look at the bones, Steve.” Bucky’s voice is the level, even stillness of a becalmed ship with dwindling rations. There is nothing agitated about it at all—if anything, it’s distanced and eerily casual—and yet it is utterly agitated. 

“They use machines and find things in the bones. That dinosaur got attacked by this other dinosaur,” he says, staring at nothing in particular, or perhaps _ through _ nothing in particular. 

Steve’s got a bad feeling about where this is headed, but he did ask to be walked through it, and he’s going to go on that tour without a complaint.

“See,” Bucky says, voice soft and deadpan but horribly alive with repressed stress. “Look at the tooth marks on the bones. Or the horn fragment between the ribs.”

Steve vaguely remembers overhearing something like that on the television while he was painting and Bucky was glued to the screen. One of the shows with the delightful British narrators, not the ones with ridiculously scripted pauses and unnecessary danger music. 

“That mammoth or giant sloth or whatever got eaten by a terror bird,” Bucky says, his voice losing a little bit more of that preternatural calm with every few words. “But this _ other _ one got roasted over a fire.” He swallows. “Or got butchered for _ meat_, because look at the _ scrape marks _ there where the human _ teeth _ gnawed on the _ bone_, or where the _ knife _ cut things _ up_.”

He turns an almost wild look at Steve, and Steve wants very much to put his hands on Bucky’s shoulders and talk him down before he gets too worked up over this. Of course, it’s even odds whether interrupting this will defuse the tension and calm Bucky back down or set it off bigger than it was otherwise going to be.

And he’s starting to feel a little of what Bucky’s feeling, and he doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like it enough that he gets caught up in it a bit, tangled in the whole butterfly effect this accidental adventure could be having on… everything.

Sure, they aren’t killing anything that looks like it could someday be a mammal, just because what if they really are way back in the past and somehow eat a missing link before it can do its thing? But that logic could be extended to other aspects of the future, and it sounds like Bucky’s been extending it—in his unfortunately paranoid fashion, and without anything to ground him—for days.

“Steve. If you had the shield…” Bucky shakes his head, hard, denying even the rest of the sentence. “Look at this t-rex, they’d say. It died because someone smashed its skull in with an enormous metal frisbee. Look at this— this—” Bucky shuts his eyes. “_Triceratops_.”

And Steve really should have caught this before now, before today, because when Bucky starts losing words, it’s usually too late to derail anything and prevent a full-blown meltdown. Steve gets to his feet anyway, because trying is better than not now that he knows what it is.

“Someone threw a grenade at its _ face_,” Bucky hisses, throwing his ball of twine to the ground, “and here’s how we _ know_. Look over here, at this— _bullet wound _ in the fucking _ dinosaur _femur!” 

His metal arm is joining in, now, and Steve feels horrible for letting this happen. “Buck,” he says, stepping in to try and offer some solid ground with a hug, something Bucky can cling to. “It’s okay, hon, we’re—”

“_We shouldn’t even be using the _ knives_, Steve!_” Bucky shouts, pushing him away without seeming to realize he’s doing it. “They will _ find _ us! However many _ fucking _ years in the future! When what used to be ‘now’ is currently taking place! They will have a whole fucking _ series _ on the _ History Channel_—”

Bucky’s hands drift up of their own volition to tangle in his hair and clench themselves into fists. “Dorks with chisels and anthropology degrees will write _ papers_— write fucking _ dissertations!_— about the mysterious prehistoric hominids that roamed the— the— the—”

He finally finds a word to follow that, but it’s yet another new direction, and he’s really screaming now, sucking up gasping breaths every time he pauses. “_The fucking _ Ancient Aliens man _ will flail at the cameras on global fucking cable TV and _ mispronounce words about us _ and Steve, I _can’t!” He tries to breathe even harder than he already is. “I can’t, I can’t, I—”

“_Okay_,” Steve croons at him. “Bucky, it’s _ okay_, it’s alright, it’s okay.” 

It’s _ not _okay. They are stranded with dinosaurs. Nothing about that is okay. But Steve’s very comfortable telling this particular brand of lie by now. It didn’t take him long after Bucky came in to learn that step one of talking Bucky down from anything is to lie through his teeth about how whatever it was that set him off is actually okay.

Steve pulls him close and uses a hand on the back of Bucky’s head to direct his face into the crook of Steve’s neck and shoulder, and this time Bucky doesn’t resist, but just folds against him and shakes. “Shh, shhhh. Breathe, hon. We’re going to make it work, Bucky. We’re going to fix it.”

“How?” Bucky croaks miserably into his shoulder, still sucking up air like he’s not positive his lungs are really working at all and he needs to put in five times the effort to make sure breathing is actually happening.

“Not sure, yet,” Steve says. The initial lie is important when Bucky freaks out, but after that, truth works best. No promises he can’t make good on. He would trade the apparently magic paper for a _ paper bag _right now, no questions asked, just so Bucky could breathe into it. For now, though, being half-smothered against his clavicle seems to be helping.

Maybe if Bucky hadn’t desperately needed this vacation and the downtime to de-stress, he’d be able to handle the… time travel… better, or for longer. Steve doubts it, though. He’s not sure _ he’s _ handling it, really. His own panic has been building pretty steadily as the symbols refuse to cooperate, and he’s probably just waiting his turn to have a screaming meltdown of his own.

It wouldn’t be new, exactly… The War was pretty messed up. And there weren’t _ dinosaurs _in Nazi Germany.

“We’ll figure something out, Buck,” he says. “I swear. Maybe not today, maybe not this week, but we’re smart enough to solve this problem and strong enough to last until we do.” He rubs soothing circles along Bucky’s back and presses a kiss to his hair. 

It’s not a lie. They’re both very intelligent, and if they aren’t on Tony’s genius level, it just means they’re more practical about things. And they are definitely strong enough to make it however long they need to out here before they find their way home. Or “back now,” he supposes.

“And, honestly?” Steve says. “There is no one I’d rather be stuck out here with than you, Buck. You and me. We may be stuck out here for a while, but we’re stuck with each other, and that’s worth a lot.”

Steve keeps his hand moving along Bucky’s spine, just standing there in their little clearing in the ferns, willing calmness back into him while Bucky’s breaths even out and his shaking gradually stops. 

And, really, _ damn _but Steve had been needing this hug. It’s a shame this is what prompted it, but they’ve both been getting a little lost in their heads and little withdrawn on a physical level, too. 

Too much hunting and gathering and survival. Too much futile doodling of stubborn symbols. Not enough working _ together_. They’re best when they’re working together, not just in proximity to one another.

Steve makes a promise to himself that he’s going to learn how to fish with his bare hands so that he can do that _ with _ Bucky, and that Bucky is going to doodle some symbols so he can do it _ with _ Steve. They’re together out here, and they’re going to really be _ together _about it. 

Because there really is _ no one _ Steve would rather be out here with than Bucky.

“…now…” 

It’s tiny, and miserable, and borderline pathetic, but it’s so much of a relief to hear that Steve squeezes Bucky even tighter, tight enough to get a little squeak out of him.

“Alright, _ now_,” he says, fighting back a grin as Bucky swats his back to get him to loosen his grip a little. “There’s no one, and there’s never _ been _ anyone, and there’ll never _ be _anyone I’d rather be in this mess with than you, Buck.”

It’s several minutes, maybe as much as half an hour, with Bucky tucked up against Steve before Bucky finally wriggles out of his grip and runs his hands through his hair. It’s not at all the same motion as before. This is not panic. It’s _ preening_.

And it makes Steve feel about a thousand times better to see it, even if they’re both grimy, greasy messes after a week and change without access to soap of any kind. Scrubbing with sand in the creek will never replace a shower. 

Bucky doesn’t seem to mind the fact that his preening session doesn’t result in lustrous, wind-tousled locks, though, which Steve takes as another very excellent sign. 

Bucky’s freak-outs might be more severe than his own, but they are like thunderstorms rolling in, drenching everything under a torrential downpour, and then moving along, leaving blue skies and chirping birds in their wake alongside the downed tree limbs.

“What,” Steve teases. “You’re not going to return the sentiment? You’d rather have Tony in this forest. I knew it.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “You’re a dumb-ass, Steve.” He scoops up his twine ball and frowns at it briefly. “Although, Stark would have had a whole tool kit in his back pocket, so when the inevitable…” 

He shakes his head. “Anyway, no. Stark would drive me to homicide, and ‘no homicide’ was my New Year’s resolution, remember?” Bucky gives him a warm and crooked smile that’s more than half genuine and only a little clouded by the remains of his earlier distress. “Any other year, you’d be my second choice, but this is your year, Stevie. You’ve made it to the top.”

“Woo,” Steve fake-cheers with a grin of his own. “I always knew I had it in me.”

And Steve knows he’s doing something right, because Bucky croons out the first line or so of the chorus to “We are the champions” before tossing him the twine ball and heading out to make sure his screaming fit didn’t sound like a dinner gong for anyone out in the ferns.

Steve lets it slide. Yes, he’s bound and determined that they will do this—all of it—together going forward. But there’s time enough to broach that subject later, when Bucky’s had a chance to truly move past this and isn’t just wearing calmness without also feeling it.

* * *

“It’s true, you know,” Bucky says as he appears out of fucking nowhere and ignores Steve’s startled gasp. 

“Jesus, Bucky,” he breathes. On the one hand, Bucky is as silent a forward scout as ever, and that’s good. On the other hand, Steve’s heart may beat perfectly after the serum, but he can still do without jump scares. He goes ahead and erases the whole symbol he was working on, since it hadn’t been right even before the errant line got spooked out onto the page.

Bucky bends over to kiss the top of his head and then continues on, holding a limp pterodactyl by the neck. “Sorry, babe.” He hunkers down to start reassembling their makeshift grill.

Steve just shakes his head. “What’s true?” he asks.

“Before we got here—”

“Now.”

Bucky shoots him a sour look over his forked sticks and flips him off with a metal finger. “Before we got now,” he says, “the only fires this whole forest—this whole planet—ever saw were natural. We’re the first man-made anything in the geological record, Steve. We’re _ going _to show up.”

Steve would be lying if he didn’t admit to having thought something along those lines as well, while Bucky was out scouting around and apparently bagging a meal. “We’ll only be here—now—a little longer, Bucky. Just until we get these symbols, and then we’re going home.”

It shouldn’t take too much longer, despite the total and complete lack of any progress. A couple more weeks, tops. Of all the millions of years of time and all the other parts of the planet that were available, the chances of this particular part of this particular forest during this particular handful of weeks being captured in rock for posterity are vanishingly slim.

Of course, the likelihood of their being present in this forest at all is, in and of itself, even more vanishingly slim. Steve’s not going to think about that, though. He’s going to save his freak-out for when they are home and surrounded by their friends and he can hyperventilate with laughter at the absurdity of it all instead of panic.

“Sure,” Bucky agrees. “But what if you’re wrong?” 

He knocks a few sparks into the dead fern tinder and adds a couple strips of palm leaf to the budding fire. “What if we’re here for a whole year? What if someone digs up this dino-bat and wonders how its skull got knocked in by a rock? What if someone stumbles on our trash pit and wonders why a bunch of fish, some of these gangly things, and a few feathery lizards are all jumbled up in a single spot, and some of them—but only some of them—a bit crispy around the edges?”

Bucky starts slicing off bits of meat from the pterodactyl, and Steve notices that he’s being careful to leave a buffer of muscle between the blade and the bone, even though that’s technically unnecessarily wasteful, because pterodactyls have startlingly little meat on their bones. 

He wonders if Bucky’s been doing that all along to avoid leaving knife marks, or if it’s a new thing.

“We’re being careful—”

“Steve, what dinosaur is out here making rope in the prehistoric woods?” He lays strip after strip of meat out on the wooden slats balanced above the little fire, sliced thin to cook fast. “What dinosaur wears fucking hiking boots and walks completely upright?”

Yes, okay, point to Bucky. But they can’t exactly help _ walking_, and without boots they’d still be leaving footprints. And it really is a smallish bit of forest on a huge planet… 

Bucky bundles the rest of the pterodactyl in some ferns to dump a mile or so out from their camp later. “We’re going to be on Ancient Aliens, Steve. We’re going to _be_ the ancient aliens.”

It’s the resigned, calm-not-calm voice, the one that has embraced the insanity but still hates it. But he’s still blue skies and birds chirping, at least. The thunderstorm isn’t moving back in.

“They are going to find our bootprints,” Bucky says, “and calculate the distance between them, and estimate the height and build of the ancient alien astronauts who traveled to this planet and seeded the Earth with the ancestral DNA necessary to bring about human life.”

He’s so matter-of-fact about it, too. It’s somewhere in between painful and amusing to hear Bucky say these things, now that he’s not in a full-on panic about it. It’s easy to imagine that Bucky’s telling a story over that campfire, and not recounting the latest paranoid twists and turns his thoughts have led him through.

“They’ll have an episode about that tree trunk we tried carving symbols in five days ago, once it’s turned into a rock. And they will _critique my handwriting_,” he growls, insulted for no reason at all because the thing he’s insulted about a) won’t happen and b) would happen in the future if it _ did _happen. 

Bucky nudges the meat strips so they don’t stick to the slats. “The moron with the big hair and the scary fake tan is going to _ judge me _ on how I hack runes into trees that might have become Earth’s answer to Groot, except that we’ve changed time itself by chipping off a crucial bit of bark to heat up some prehistoric chicken tenders.”

“No one’s writing a television series about prehistoric super soldiers, Buck, chicken tenders or no chicken tenders.” Steve looks down, and finds that he’s sketched a doodle of Bucky grilling dinosaur filets on an open fire. With a chef’s hat, topped by a pine cone. He sighs and goes to erase it. 

If only he’d been holding his actual sketchpad and not just one torn-out sheet from it when… whatever happened had happened. Whatever entirely non-magical but technologically inexplicable thing it was.

“You say that,” Bucky mutters. “You don’t _ know_. The Ancient Aliens man has said so many stupid things on that show that one of them is bound to be right, eventually. And it’ll be about us.”

“Bucky,” he starts.

“It’ll be worse than the Smithsonian framing your goddamn underwear, Steve.” Bucky jabs in his direction with the stick he’s using as a fireplace poker. “Just. You. Wait. We’re going to be stuck here until we catch up to ourselves. We’re going to outlive that stupid asteroid or comet or whatever, and we’re going to teach our own ancestors how to fish, and they’ll be _ right_.”

Bucky shakes his head and flips over the meat strips with his left hand. “They’ll be right, Steve,” he mutters darkly. “The Ancient Aliens man and all of his insane fake-scientist friends will be right. There _ was _ a traveler from the stars who came and directed the course of human evolution, and that fucker was the two of us.”

* * *

That night, with their fire safely out, their pterodactyl carcass safely dumped out of range of their little nest, and their butts settled securely up in the treehouse, Steve looks out into the night and sighs. 

If he is going to bring things up, now is the time to do that. He thinks it will probably be better to ease into it.

“You said, earlier, something about the inevitable, Buck.” Steve keeps his arm around Bucky’s shoulder loose so that he can feel any tensing up Bucky does, and is relieved that there isn’t any. “Was that just the History Channel, or us ending up now, or is there something else?”

Bucky’s quiet for a long moment, snugged up against him with his hands folded in his lap, long enough that Steve’s almost thinking he’s just going to pretend he didn’t hear the question. And maybe Steve’ll ask again, and maybe he’ll let it drop for now, but he doesn’t actually have to decide, because Bucky does eventually speak up.

“Used to get routine maintenance after missions,” he says, voice a dull sort of soft that would worry Steve except that he’s talking about this and not keeping it all inside. “Sometimes a whole work-over. Sometimes just the wipe. Usually at least a quick check on the arm.”

Bucky’s quiet for a moment, then: “Don’t think that last bit’s going to be an option for us.”

Now that it’s been pointed out, Steve can see the plated-metal uncertainty looming in their future. Bucky doesn’t make a trip up to the lab to let Tony have a go at his metal arm unless something has actually gone wrong on an op or been smashed or twisted wrong during a sparring session. 

But he does still end up visiting Tony in the lab every four or five months. Almost like clockwork.

That might just be a coincidence. It could just happen to take four or five months for circumstances to align where he takes a damaging hit to a joint or gets zapped with something that fries a circuit or two. 

Barton goes roughly eight months, or two major missions, between serious injury of some kind. He used to get three colds a year and one of them turning into pneumonia before the serum. Tony explodes something in his lab more or less once a month. Patterns like that are just the way life works.

But that four or five month window between Bucky’s visits to Tony might be truly routine maintenance, just showing up as a glitch or as damage. Things could just naturally wear down from use until by month four or five, something is lined up to fail.

Bucky carries tools with him essentially everywhere, but they’re not usually on his person in the way his knives are. At “this” point millions of years in the future, those tools are in his pack in a set of ruins on the side of a mountain. And that means when something does go wrong with his metal arm… there won’t be a lot of options for fixing it.

And yes. That’s a big enough concern, a scary enough concern, an inevitable enough concern, that Steve can see how easy it would be to push that aside as _ too _ big, _ too _ scary, _ too _ inevitable to deal with right now. To let it build up in the background while studiously ignoring it, until something smaller and sillier gets blown out of proportion instead because _ something’s _got to give.

Just like the metal arm has probably got to give at some point.

“Oh, shit,” he breathes. “Bucky, I— I didn’t even think about that.” So much for looking out for each other. Between the way Bucky avoids drawing attention to it unless pressured by damage or functionality to do so and the past handful of years Steve has spent trying to do the same… it just had not crossed his mind.

Bucky shrugs under his arm, the motion small and casual, genuinely casual. “That’s fine. I figure I’ve been thinking about it enough for both of us.”

Steve shakes his head and shifts around to face him. He doesn’t want to pull his arm from around Bucky’s shoulders or put even an inch of physical distance between them, but he needs for them to really look at each other for this, to see expressions. “No. It’s not fine. We’re in this together.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says with confused smile, squaring up to sit facing him as well. “That’s the assumption I’ve been going off of, too.” He reaches up to tap Steve’s forehead lightly, his expression a blend of curious and concerned. “What’s going on in there, Steve? What are you thinking? Spell it out for me, babe.”

“It’s just that you’ve done all the hunting for us, Buck. Everything. Fishing, throwing rocks, stabbing things. And—”

“You don’t like killing things, Stevie.” Bucky’s palm is warm and gentle at the side of his face, his thumb stroking a cheekbone while his fingertips curl under his ear along the back of his jaw, and Steve leans into the touch. 

“And I’m really good at it,” Bucky continues, soft and reassuring, his hand making up for some of the physical contact lost earlier. “I can do all our killing so you don’t have to. Even if I’m eventually down an arm.”

Steve shakes his head again, but just a little, not enough to dislodge Bucky’s hand. “No,” he says. “No, Buck, that’s not—” He smiles and lets out a little breath. “I mean, _ thank you_. You’re right, I hate it.”

He reaches to cradle Bucky’s metal hand between his palms. “And you don’t freeze up about it just because they’re cute, the way I do,” he admits. “It’s logical. And thoughtful. And I appreciate it.” Steve runs the edge of his thumbnail lightly along the hairline grooves of Bucky’s fingers. “But it means you’re out _ there_, Bucky. And I’m right _ here_.”

Bucky lets his right hand drift down between them to join Steve’s hands, turning his metal hand so that all their fingers are intertwined. “I’m not going anywhere, Steve.”

“It means we’re being practical,” Steve says, pushing on, “that we’re splitting the workload and playing to our strengths. And usually that’d be a good thing. But…”

Buck raises his eyebrows. “Steven Grant Rogers. Are you trying to tell me that an _ actual _ survival situation is _ not _a time to be practical?”

“…yes and no. When it comes to surviving, yeah, practical is good, and you’ve got it down. But…” Steve takes in a breath. “Bucky, you spent the last three days working yourself into an anxiety attack and I didn’t see it happening until it was too late.”

He gently frees a hand to put his fingertips against Bucky’s lips as they part to offer up an objection of some sort. “Please,” he says, turning the motion into a caress as Bucky closes his mouth again with a little frown. 

“And while you did that,” he says, leaning forward and cupping Bucky’s cheek, “I spent three days doing almost the exact same thing. Getting worked up and anxious and frustrated. And turning off my brain because my thinking wasn’t getting me anywhere good.”

Bucky gives him a fondly exasperated sigh and raises his own hand to rest over Steve’s, palm to the backs of Steve’s fingers. “Aw, Stevie… You dumb fuck.” He curls his fingers to pull Steve’s hand away and twine their fingers together again. “I’m an example of what _ not _to do.”

“Maybe, sure.” Steve grins at him, then sobers again. “But I think it illustrates my point, Bucky. There is so much about all this that’s going to get us in trouble mentally, on top of all the physical stuff. We’ve got to really be doing this together.”

“Right now,” he continues, “we’re doing two different things side by side, and yes. It gets more done…” He lifts their joined hands between them for emphasis. “…but _ we’re _ not doing well, Buck.”

“Well I’m not arguing with that last bit,” Bucky says. “These past few days _ sucked_. Worst vacation ever.”

Steve smiles. He doesn’t have much room to talk, but… “I don’t think you’ve ever taken one before this, Buck. What are you comparing it to?” 

He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. This one’s not selling vacations as a pleasant, repeatable experience.” Bucky gives him a sour look. “I feel lied to about the entire subject of vacations.”

Well, if Bucky was lied to about vacations being calming, stress-relieving stretches of time to rest and psychologically recuperate from the tension of the field, Steve was, too. Maybe they’ll write a strongly worded letter and send it to the S.H.I.E.L.D. therapists when they get back. Ah well. It’s neither here nor there—literally, since it’s more now and then.

“Teach me how to fish, Bucky.”

“Didn’t I try once? I think I tried once.”

“Yeah, well, there was a war on,” Steve says. “I was kind of distracted by not dying or getting anyone else killed under my command.”

Bucky raises a single, dubious eyebrow. “Sure it wasn’t you being too fond of the worms to string ‘em on the hook?”

“And I’ll split palm fibers for you to twist up into string.” He’s not avoiding the subject of innocent worms being impaled and drowned and devoured for the sake of their dinner. He’s not. And fishing _ now_, well, that’s by hand. They don’t even have a hook or a line. So no worms. Nothing’s got to die but the fish.

Steve smiles at Bucky’s eye roll. “And you spend some time drawing in the dirt trying to get those symbols. If you’re not using the charcoal or the paper, you won’t be stressed out about wasting supplies.”

He can only assume that’s Bucky’s primary reasoning for not messing with the paper and charcoal—and therefore the symbols at all—since the first couple of days. Given how focused he’s been on acquiring what supplies they could and stretching those supplies out, it’s a more than logical reason.

Bucky slowly nods, his eyes unfocused and his gaze wandering in that way that means he’s mentally charting out plans and contingencies to those plans, strategies and the necessary setup to put them into play. 

“Yeah,” he says, thoughtful. “Okay.” Bucky refocuses in the space of a blink, and looks back at him directly. “We need to relocate.”

Well that’s out of nowhere. “Okay,” Steve agrees, because Bucky probably knows best. “We can do that. Why?”

“This is a really short term setup.” He nods to indicate their surroundings without releasing Steve’s hands. “The tree, the stream. And don’t take this wrong, because you do make a good vertical pillow, but I kinda miss sleeping horizontally, and we don’t have the materials we’d need to expand this thing that much and still support our weight.”

“And the ground isn’t an option?” Steve asks. “You don’t think our hearing will beat some dinosaur’s stealth mode?”

“Bugs,” Bucky says. “Flash flooding. Falling—”

“Flash flooding?” Steve gives him an incredulous look. “It rains, sure, but this is not the kind of place that gets a flash flood, even if we were closer to the stream. Which we’re not.”

Bucky stares at him for a moment, like he’s priming the ground for his pronouncement to land firmly. “Fossils are often made when riverbeds overflow and silt and sediment get deposited on dead things, footsteps, little plants, whatever.”

“That’s nice, but—”

“There are a damn lot of fossils, Steve. And we’ve been here all of two weeks. I’m not trusting two weeks of weather-watching to predict a year’s worth of weather patterns.”

Steve gets the feeling Bucky would be pointing a lecturing finger in his direction, maybe even poking him in the chest with it, if Steve didn’t have a solid grip on both his hands. 

“And neither are _ you_,” Bucky insists. “Because _ I’m _ not going to let you _ be _that stupid.”

“…a year’s worth?”

Bucky shrugs. “What you’re suggesting is going to slow us down. We need to be thinking in terms of months, Steve. Maybe even years.” He shakes his head, his expression warming into one of those gentle displays most of their colleagues rarely see. “Not ‘any day now.’ I’m sorry, Stevie. That’s the time frame we’re looking at.”

Steve takes a long moment to processes that. The two weeks haven’t exactly flown by, though they hadn’t dragged on, either. He can easily imagine another two weeks. Imagining two months, though… Two _ years_… 

Bucky had this camp set up their first night, and everything else has been a series of improvements on the base design, not redesigning anything from scratch. Maybe a few days finding a better location, but… months? Years?

“We’re going to need a defensible camp with restful sleeping possibilities and a dedicated food prep area to make us less attractive to scavengers.” Bucky pauses. “Since said scavengers tend to be taller than we are.”

Bucky nods, his mental plans obviously firming up as he speaks. “Somewhere we can reliably and easily stock dry wood for fires and set those fires without lighting up the whole forest around us. The smoke will keep the bugs away, maybe even preserve some meat.”

“We need to plan it really well, Steve, or we’re going to waste loads of time.” Bucky nods toward the forest below. “And while we _ have _loads of it available to waste, something in the millions of years, I’d like our efforts to actually lead somewhere. Like home.”

“No, yeah,” Steve says. “That’s definitely our goal. We should be working toward that.” He knew his idea would slow them down a bit. He just hadn’t quite thought the new strategy would somehow take months or years.

Bucky gives his hands a squeeze. “Doing all that together is going to slow down whatever progress you’ve been making on that ticket home. It does still make sense for you to focus on that and for me to do all the prep and set—”

“I’m not making any progress,” he blurts out. And that hurts to admit, but it’s true. In two weeks, he’s gotten no closer to a symbol, and the harder he chases them, the faster they scatter from his memories. 

Steve looks down at their hands. It makes a sort of sense, if accepts the theory that he might just be trying too hard. He just wishes that didn’t strand them… now. Wishes he didn’t feel like he was letting Bucky down.

“Okay.” There’s not even a tenuous thread of accusation in Bucky’s voice. Just calm acceptance and a hint of sympathy, of all things. Like their return wasn’t squarely on Steve’s shoulders. Like he wasn’t the one that put them in this forest in the first place.

Bucky rubs his thumbs over the backs of Steve’s hands. “Then we spend a week taking a break from that. Maybe two weeks. Give the symbols the silent treatment. Get a true base camp in place. Get your forestry skills polished up. Then…”

Steve looks up at him, not sure what comes next, but sensing a shift in the man sitting opposite him. 

“Maybe we take things slow,” Bucky says, his own words slowing down as well, and his focus drifting a bit. “Maybe… Maybe I don’t use… Maybe I go right-handed. Mostly. Give the ambidextrous thing a pass for a while. Just.” He shrugs, the gesture small and tight, not his usual loose and almost playful shrug at all. “Just in case.”

Just in case I have to make this metal arm last years without a tune-up. Just in case I need the practice. Just in case something really breaks and I only have one functional arm to work with and being right-handed is the only option I have. Just in case the inevitable happens.

He doesn’t say any of it—Bucky almost never does, would probably let his metal arm fall off before voicing any specific concerns about it if doing so wouldn’t jeopardize his teammates—but he doesn’t have to. Steve can hear it in his voice, read it in the set of his shoulders, see it in his eyes. Bucky’s always had such expressive eyes.

“Sounds like a plan,” Steve says. He gives Bucky’s hands a squeeze and nods. “Set the symbols aside. Get ourselves dug in for the long haul. Prepare for the worst case. Sounds like a good plan. A plan that’ll work.”

It _ will _ work, too. They will _ make _ it work. _ Steve _will make it work, whatever it takes. And he’ll learn how to do whatever it is that will require two hands. He’ll make it so that Bucky doesn’t have an opportunity to feel like he’s a burden, because Bucky… 

Bucky never let _him_ feel that way. Never let him feel like a failure of any sort.

Not when he was laid up with the latest round of cold, flu, pneumonia, fever. Not when he lost a job because he was too sick to show up for work. Not when he couldn’t help with some of the household chores because his lungs would freeze up or his joints were too swollen that evening. Not when he needed tending through the night and Bucky needed sleep but wouldn’t leave his side. 

Not when he was reeling from his first encounter with a mortar blast, or mourning the first of the men to die under his direct command, following orders _he’d_ given and a plan _he’d_ designed, and he was drowning in self-recrimination. Not after a run-in with an abandoned dairy farm in the French countryside that demonstrated that the serum meant nothing in the face of bad milk, and the whole lot of them were filled with regrets and not much else.

And not when a mission goes south instead of just sideways, when a good call still ends bad, when they can’t stop the building from collapsing. Not when the press is somehow the least nosey of the parties interested in his life and nothing feels like it’s allowed to be personal anymore, and he just needs a few days, a few hours, even just a minute to be Steve Rogers without an audience.

He doesn’t owe Bucky anything. It’s never been a favor to be returned. It’s never been a transaction, an accrued debt, an imposition to be made up for later. That was just what Bucky did for him, what he still does for him. And this is just what Steve will do for Bucky, whether it’s just in case or planning for the inevitable.

They’ve been taking care of each other for essentially all of their unfrozen lives, and they’ll keep on doing it, because that’s who they are. Before the War, during the War, after the War—and now, both before and after all of that.

“We’re going to have to step it up on the secrecy front, though,” Bucky says. “You’re going to have to be on board with that.”

Steve feels like the right answer is their equivalent of “yes, dear,” but he’s lost track of what they’re being secretive about, and the whole notion seems like it’s coming from left field.

“What?”

Bucky nudges his knee against Steve’s. “This little treehouse is going to be a cinch to totally obliterate. The ground will be a little harder, but I can muddy up the waters a bit. Should throw people off. But—”

“Throw _ who _off? We are the only two people currently in existence.”

Bucky heaves a sigh. “We’re going to be on the goddamn History Channel, Steve. A long-term base camp, something properly established, that’s going to show up in the geological record.”

Oh. This again. Steve supposes he can’t really fault Bucky for latching onto something a bit less nightmarish than the repeated loss of a limb. He’s calm about it, in any case. Accepting the inevitable conspiracy fame.

“And when they haul out a piece of fossilized bark to prove that ancient astronauts taught early Man to write,” Bucky says, “the site they pull that shit up out of is not going to be half-assed.”

“Nope,” Steve agrees. “Not half-assed.”

“If I’ve gotta be… fucking ‘Jurassic Man’ on cable TV, they’re going to be really fucking impressed by what they dig up.”

Steve smiles. “Okay, Bucky. They’ll be really impressed.”

“That, or they aren’t going to find a single goddamn thing.” Bucky pulls a hand free to gesture with. “There’s no in between. I’m a fucking _ ghost_, and the Ancient Aliens community can be as skeptical about my existence as the so-called intelligence community was.”

“You got it, Buck. Amazing and impressive or a complete mystery shrouded in smoke.” 

Steve hasn’t got a single clue how Bucky intends to manage that, and he’s close to certain it won’t matter because nothing they do will be fossilized in the first place. He’s still willing to humor him. “No in between.”

Bucky’s eyes light up a little, and Steve has just the tiniest shred of concern before Bucky confirms that concern is the order of the day. 

“That’s an excellent idea, Steve.” Bucky traces a circle in the air with his index finger. “We’ll burn it all down before we leave.”

“The whole _ forest?_” Surely not. Steve doesn’t think he’s willing to humor Bucky to _ that _ extent. “_Bucky—_”

“I’m the Winter Soldier, not Smokey the Bear.”

Steve can’t even tell how serious he’s being right now. If they were home, he would know it was a joke. But they aren’t home, and Bucky likes fire more than is strictly healthy, particularly explosive fire.

“And I’m Captain America,” he says, “and maybe I’d like to prevent forest fires.”

Bucky laughs, which isn’t a surefire indication that he’s joking. “We’ll decide later, Stevie.” He pats Steve’s knee with his free hand. “By which I mean we’ll do it my way.”

And yes, sure, they probably will do it Bucky’s way, just so long as Bucky’s way doesn’t involve putting a whole dinosaur forest to the torch. The best way to make sure it doesn’t is to agree and formalize that agreement. Gives him time to make sure it’s a joke, and time to mitigate the disaster if it isn’t. 

“Shake on it?” he asks.

Bucky looks down at Steve’s hand as though he’s read Steve’s mind, then back upward, but slowly on the return. “Do you one better,” he says, before reaching for the front of Steve’s shirt and hauling him close for a kiss.

Steve’s not sure what the treehouse’s weight rating is compared to the weight of two overlapping super soldiers, but he figures that’s Bucky’s problem to work out, and Bucky’s no doubt done the math a few times already if he’s willing to drag Steve into his lap. 

And Steve’s more than willing to be dragged, because as it turns out, “kissing on it” is way, way better than “shaking on it.”


End file.
